Software appliance is a software application designed for installation in industry standard hardware. The standard hardware may include a server or a virtual machine. The software appliance may be packaged with the standard hardware to provide a hardware appliance. The hardware appliance may be designed and configured to perform specific functions. The software appliance may include restrictions to be used only with supplier approved hardware.
Customers may request the hardware appliance from a supplier for specific applications. The supplier may install and configure the software appliance in the hardware based on the customer's requested specifications. When customers want to make changes to the hardware appliance, the customer needs to request a new hardware appliance from the supplier. The customers may also return the old hardware appliance to the supplier to be reconfigured with a new software appliance or request the supplier to reconfigure the hardware appliance at the customer's location. However, all of these methods are time consuming and costly. In addition, existing methods for installing and configuring the software appliance on the hardware provide little flexibility for re-deployment of existing hardware.